San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
D.A., seen as both hero and villain, takes middle road
To her fiercest critics, she’s an icy, corrupt puppet of the mayor who will stuff San Francisco’s jails with low-level offenders and probably cackle as she does it. To her most loyal supporters, she’s Superwoman, a savior in a suit who’s arrived to restore justice, safety and accountability to our failing city.
Not surprisingly in San Francisco’s increasingly toxic, polarized political stew, neither version of new District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is accurate. But who is the real Jenkins, and what are her plans?
To try to find out, I spent time over the past few weeks with the new district attorney in her office and at news conferences, as she talked to community members and as she took her kids to a playground and ice cream parlor. It was the first time I’d spoken to
Christina Hunt, who moved to S.F. from Lexington, Mass., cheers at the Connecticut Yankee sports bar.
her at length since she revealed in this column last fall that she was quitting her job as a homicide prosecutor to join the campaign to recall her boss, District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Eight months later, voters booted Boudin, and Mayor London Breed named Jenkins, 41, as his successor on July 7. Immediately, the portraits emerged of Jenkins as a villain or a hero before she could do much of anything at all. Some of Boudin's supporters have tried to paint her in stark terms — conservative to his progressive — when the truth is she's fairly middle-of-theroad in San Francisco, pledging to continue some of Boudin's reforms while paring back others.
“No one has wanted to press pause and see how this plays out rather than just forming an opinion,” she said in an interview in her office, where the walls were still blank and the photos still unframed. “Even when I spoke out against Chesa, it wasn't on day one or day two. I worked for him for a year and a half before I decided I'd had enough.”
Boudin didn't respond to a request for an interview for this column.
Jenkins surely set herself up for resistance by becoming the face of the recall in a city divided over criminal justice reform. And before she could begin to shape her plans and policies as district attorney, she handed her critics a huge gift. She filed required disclosure forms showing she'd effectively misled the public in describing herself as a recall campaign volunteer. The month after my original column ran, she took a handsomely paid gig with a nonprofit that was closely linked to the recall and funded by a billionaire who also backed the campaign.
The arrangement wasn't illegal, experts say, but it doesn't look good. The recall organizers would have been much smarter to hire Jenkins outright, because the impression — which Jenkins calls false — is that they provided her an income that would allow her time to work on the recall, rather than take another full-time prosecutorial job.
Jenkins should have owned up to the arrangement as soon as she took the new job, not wait until she was obligated to do so on disclosure forms.
Shortly after her appointment, news also emerged that as she left Boudin's office and gave up her homicide case load, she failed to turn over evidence in one case to the defense, prompting her former bosses to dismiss and restart the case. Those supervisors then initiated an internal review of all of Jenkins' past work, and no other issues are known to have arisen. Jenkins told me she made a mistake.
“Nobody's been able to demonstrate that I haven't done this job ethically and done it well,” she said. “That doesn't mean you're perfect.”
Here's guessing that despite these red flags, San Francisco voters in November will prioritize the same issues that fueled them to remove Boudin. They are desperate for a city that works — where Asian elders are not targeted for attack, where open-air fentanyl markets don't fill sidewalks and where repeat offenders of serious crimes face serious consequences.
State Sen. Scott Wiener endorsed Jenkins before her disclosure form emerged and is sticking with her now. Wiener, who was neutral in the Boudin recall, said he's talked with Jenkins many times and likes that she seeks a “measured, middle ground.”
“Everyone gets caricatured in politics, including myself and including, frankly, Chesa Boudin,” Wiener told me. “She's being caricatured as Attila the Hun, and she's definitely not. She's someone who is deeply passionate about this community, and I think we need to give her the opportunity to succeed.”
Del Seymour, founder of Code Tenderloin and a stalwart in the struggling neighborhood, said he opposed the Boudin recall and hasn't seen any improvement in the Tenderloin or Mid-Market since Jenkins took office, its sidewalks still filled with drug dealers and those selling stolen goods.
Still, he said, he's openminded.
“I want to do what San Francisco won't do — they will not give a new voice a chance,” he said. “Let her do her job. Give her six months.”
But she has only three. Voters in November must decide whether she deserves the job outright. So what is Jenkins' backstory and vision for the city's future? What are her policies, and how do they differ from Boudin's? Here's what I found out.
***
Critics say Jenkins will revert to the tough-on-crime, lock-'em-up policies still employed in many California counties, but the number of jail inmates under her tenure has edged up only slightly. On July 8, the day she was sworn in, there were 767 people in San Francisco's jails. On Thursday, there were 771. Capacity is 1,044.
Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, who is endorsing Jenkins in the November race, has worked in the city jails for 27 years and has seen the number of incarcerated people drop steadily from about 4,000 because of statewide legal reforms and a series of liberal district attorneys, Superior Court judges and other city leaders.
That's clearly a positive change, but Miyamoto said the shift has sometimes gone too far — and that people charged with serious, violent felonies were regularly released pretrial on electronic monitoring under Boudin. Data shows about half of people ordered to wear ankle monitors commit crimes that are serious enough that a warrant is issued for their arrest, and dozens of people each month cut off their monitors, a recent KTVU investigation showed.
“I believe a lot of us in the system just don't want to keep seeing the revolving door,” Miyamoto said. “We want people to get help and to get better, so it's encouraging to know that (D.A. Jenkins) wants to bring a balanced approach.”
Jenkins said she has “no desire to fill up jails,” but said she does intend to seek incarceration more often than Boudin did — mostly for people repeatedly accused of serious crimes. Asked whether she considers herself tough on crime, she said, “I think I'm tough when I need to be.”
“If it's a sexual assault case or domestic violence or murder, you've got to be tough,” she said. “We've been living in a universe where regardless of how many times people offend and in what ways, there has been no consequence at all.”
She bristles at blanket policies, saying each case should be looked at individually. Soon, she's planning to announce
a lifting of Boudin's ban on prosecuting juveniles as adults, but she's pledged to make such a move only in the most extreme cases such as a 17-year-old mass shooter — and said it's likely she'll never do it.
Last week, she also announced her cash bail policy, saying she, like Boudin, is generally opposed to cash bail because it harms low-income people. Their policies appear similar — including seeking pretrial detention in serious, violent crimes when public safety is in jeopardy — though Jenkins is likely to seek pretrial detention more often.
Perhaps where Jenkins diverges most from Boudin is her determination to get a lot stricter with people arrested multiple times for selling fentanyl, the powerful synthetic drug that has contributed to a huge spike in overdose deaths — often because people unwittingly buy other drugs that are laced with it.
“It's the people who are selling it and who understand fundamentally just how lethal it is and who don't care,” Jenkins said. “That to me is criminal.”
She sees drug use as a public health issue and drug dealing, particularly repeat offenses involving fentanyl, as a serious, violent crime. Critics say punitive approaches to addiction have failed and have unfairly targeted poor people and people of color.
At a news conference in early August, Jenkins said she would seek pretrial detention in extreme cases involving fentanyl sales — pointing to one man who had six open cases, all for dealing fentanyl in the Tenderloin, including one in which he was arrested with 100 grams of the drug, enough to kill tens of thousands of San Franciscans. Boudin had offered that defendant one misdemeanor count to settle all six cases, she said. Ana Gonzalez, who was fired by Boudin in his first days in office and who Jenkins hired back as her chief assistant, said she returned because of Jenkins' victimcentered approach, pointing to drug dealing as an example.
“I don't think you can call it a ‘war on drugs' when you're talking about dealers who are peddling death to the truly impoverished and who are destroying neighborhoods of mainly immigrants and poor families who don't have the
luxury of picking up and moving to Russian Hill,” she said.
***
Jenkins can't succeed, though, without the full effort of the San Francisco Police Department, which has shown numerous times over the past few years that some of its police officers don't feel like doing much policing.
Jenkins said she and Police Chief Bill Scott have a “very collegial” relationship and have talked a handful of times. She said she hopes police overall feel more motivated to work hard since “this office will do its part,” but only time will tell if police just used Boudin as an excuse to shrug off crime and have no intention of getting to work.
Jenkins also described her relationship with Breed as collegial, but disputes that she's beholden to the mayor who gave her the job.
Though Breed's staff managed Jenkins' communications at first and assigned a handler for her first meetings, that arrangement has ended, and Jenkins said she's independent of the mayor. “She's given me the job, and that's over and done,” she said. “She and I don't talk about cases or policies.”
She said she thinks some of the early attacks on her would not be happening if she wasn't a woman of color. “Generally when you come from a marginalized community like the Black community, the Latino community, people are so accustomed to muting your voice, they don't even realize it,” said Jenkins, whose mother is Black and whose father is from El Salvador.
One of her opponents in November's race, Joe Alioto Veronese, scoffed at Jenkins' claim of independence from Breed. He called her “an opportunist” who moved to San Francisco from the East Bay with an eye on scoring the disrict attorney's seat as soon as she quit the office, an assertion that Jenkins denies. She said she signed the lease on her Mission Bay apartment on Oct. 27, 2021 — back when the recall's success seemed like a long shot.
“I think it's been a disaster,” Alioto Veronese said of Jenkins' tenure so far, adding San Franciscans will soon “discover the real Brooke Jenkins.”
Her other opponent in November, John Hamasaki, said Jenkins' lack of management experience has left the already battered office feeling rudderless.
“What I've heard from inside the office is there's a lot of frustration with the interim D.A. being out campaigning and not running the office,” he said. “What people keep saying is it feels like nobody's in charge.”
Jenkins is already trying to focus voters on her opponents' lack of prosecutorial and management experience. Asked whether he has management experience, Hamasaki pointed to running his own law firm. He acknowledged, though, the firm comprises just him and one paralegal.
Perhaps the biggest adjustment for Jenkins has been handling the intense job while also raising her kids, a 6-yearold girl and a 2-year-old boy. Her husband, Daniel Jenkins, is a warehouse manager for Hello Fresh.
Investigators with the District Attorney's Office provide security for Jenkins during the day and said it's the first time the big black Chevy Tahoe to chauffeur the city's top prosecutor has contained two car seats. Her kids climbed into the back on a recent afternoon to drive to an ice cream shop, her boy carting his SpiderMan lunch box filled with toy cars and her girl placing her peach Vans on the seat in front of her.
“You want to see normal life?” Jenkins asked me, looking a bit frazzled. “Here you go.”
It was just Jenkins and her mom when she was growing up in Union City and Fremont. Her mom was in college when she had Jenkins and quit her studies to work as a bank teller to raise her baby alone. She returned to college when Jenkins was 11, and later became a high school counselor.
Jenkins didn't meet her dad until she was 21 and sent him an announcement about her 2003 graduation from UC Berkeley to his family's home in El Salvador. He'd ignored her previous overtures.
“For the first time in my life,” she said, “there was a response.”
She flew to meet him in Germany, where he lives with his wife and her two half brothers, and they've become close. Jenkins graduated from law school at the University of Chicago in 2006 and worked at a corporate law firm before getting hired by then-District Attorney George Gascón in 2014 and earning a promotion to the homicide unit from Boudin.
She was motivated to enter public service after losing her first baby, who she'd named Justice, shortly after his premature birth. Her two kids now fuel the way she thinks about the criminal justice system, she explained.
She wants to make sure the streets of San Francisco are as safe as possible for them — and knows Black people and other people of color are disproportionately victims of crime, including gun violence.
“Everything I do impacts whether the city they live in is safe for them, and as my son grows older, whether I'm helping to create a society where it's less likely that if he gets pulled over by the cops, something crazy will happen,” she said.
“I hope they never end up in the criminal justice system,” she continued, nodding toward her kids. “But it's highly likely that even if they don't, somebody they know will, and I need to create a system that's more fair and just for whoever that is.”
“I want them to look back and say their mom's legacy as a district attorney was to make our city and our society better,” she said.
Whether she can achieve that remains to be seen. The clock is ticking — and the city is most certainly watching.